Pasadena-Based Effort To Build Earthbound Telescope Hundreds of Times More Powerful Than Any Other Gets $205 Million Boost

Pasadena-based GMTO Corporation, on a mission to build the Giant Magellan Telescope — slated to be one of the world’s most powerful telescopes — announced it has secured a $205 million investment to accelerate construction.

The telescope will have 10 times the light collecting area and four times the spatial resolution of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It will also be up to 200 times more powerful than existing research telescopes.

A GMTO statement said the investment marks one of the largest funding rounds for the telescope since its founding. It includes leading commitments from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), The University of Texas at Austin, University of Arizona, and the University of Chicago.

The company added the new funding will be used to manufacture the giant 12-story telescope structure at Ingersoll Machine Tools in Illinois, continue progress on the telescope’s seven primary mirrors at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab, and build one of the most advanced scientific spectrograph instruments in Texas.

“We are honored to receive this investment in our future,” Dr. Robert Shelton, President of the Giant Magellan Telescope. “The funding is truly a collaborative effort from our Founders. It will result in the fabrication of the world’s largest mirrors, the giant telescope mount that holds and aligns them, and a science instrument that will allow us to study the chemical evolution of stars and planets like never before.”

The Giant Magellan Telescope is under construction at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Once completed, it will allow astronomers to see farther into space with more detail than any other optical telescope before.

With this unprecedented angular resolution, combined with revolutionary spectrographs and high-contrast cameras, the Giant Magellan Telescope will work in direct synergy with JWST to empower new scientific discoveries. It will enable scientists to search the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets for life, study the first galaxies that formed in the Universe, and find clues that will unravel the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and the formation of the Universe itself.

“We are working with some of the brightest engineers and scientists at leading research institutions around the globe,” Dr. Walter Massey, Board Chair of Giant Magellan Telescope and former Director of the National Science Foundation, said. “The recent contributions from our investing partners in the Giant Magellan Telescope are collectively pushing the boundaries of astronomy, making the future a reality, and allowing us to answer some key science goals, including ‘Are we alone in the Universe?’”

The GMTO Corporation is an international consortium of leading research institutions representing five countries. The company anticipates construction to be completed later in the decade.

For more information, visit www.giantmagellan.org.